§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

What’s The Real Deal In Ferguson?

Only liberal-progressives could feel justified in mobilizing a media campaign to incite further rioting, believing that “caring” in the abstract for “victims of oppression” trumps maintenance of law and order for the benefit of all citizens, black and white.

Only liberal-progressives could ignore the rights of innocent residents whose property was vandalized in Ferguson and elsewhere; after all, in socialist ideology, capitalism and property ownership are evils that must be controlled or eliminated by collectivized government in the name of social justice.

Only liberal-progressives could attribute to racism the anger of the majority of Americans when they see gangs of people in the nighttime streets looting and burning businesses of people who had nothing whatever to do with the Ferguson incident.

Only liberal-progressives could dismiss legitimate grievances of citizens alarmed by rampant crime among young black males and the readiness of their elders to blame the white community for conduct that raises fear for the survival of our political society.

Only liberal-progressives could sneeringly dismiss people with those concerns as racists who “cling to their Bibles and guns.”

In Class Prejudice Resurgent (New York Times, December 1, 2014), columnist David Brooks correctly observes that the Ferguson fulminations are different from civil rights issues. He doesn’t, however, note that more fundamentally Ferguson represents refusal of liberal-progressives and their black political supporters to accept responsibility for their own actions. Liberal-progressive hippies and flower children were fond of spiritual concepts such as karma, but failed to understand its substance: you reap what you sow.

Responding to one of liberal-progressives’ gauzy platitudes, Mr. Brooks writes:

It’s often said after events like Ferguson that we need a national conversation on race. That’s a bit true. We all need to improve our capacity for sympathetic understanding, our capacity to imaginatively place ourselves in the minds of other people with experiences different from our own. Conversation can help, though I suspect novels, works of art and books like Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” work better.

But, ultimately, we don’t need a common conversation; we need a common project. If the nation works together to improve social mobility for the poor of all races, through projects like President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, then social distance will decline, classism will decline and racial prejudice will obliquely decline as well.

In a friendship, people don’t sit around talking about their friendship. They do things together. Through common endeavor people overcome difference to become friends.

Mr. Brooks’s “common endeavor” is a pipe dream.

As I noted in Ferguson Again, the root cause is President Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society welfare state, which destroyed the cohesion of so many black families and spawned large numbers of black young men raised in single-parent, welfare-addicted households. Liberal icon Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted at the time that the result was going to be black neighborhoods terrorized by remorseless, conscienceless young black men. One of those was Ferguson’s Michael Brown.